we will burn these nights 'til we are whole
by SerenLyall
Summary: Kathryn Janeway and Owen Paris have been rescued from the Cardassians and returned to Earth. But, while the wounds of the flesh are quickly healed, the wounds of the mind and soul are not.


**Disclaimer:** Star Trek: Voyager, and all thus-related characters, names, places, and objects, are not mine and never will be.

 **Trigger Warnings:** Past/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied Rape/Non-con, some not super explicit sex, self-harm

 **Notes:** this fic has been six months in the making. I was inspired by Mia-Cooper's fic _Denial,_ in particular the line "Her heart was cauterized in a Cardassian prison...". This fic is also a sequel to my fic _red string (will be your noose)_. Reading that one is not strictly required, though it will make this one feel richer and more "complete", I think. Fair warning about _red string_ , though: it deals with the actual events of Kathryn's and Owen Paris's imprisonment, and thus graphic violence and rape trigger warnings are in full effect for that fic.

Many thanks to tumblr users absynthe-minded and Mia-Cooper for their fantastic beta work, as well as for helping and encouraging me throughout this whole process. I probably would have given up on this fic four months ago without them.

Lastly, I hope you all enjoy (if enjoy is the right word), and I'd love to hear from you.

* * *

 **we will burn these nights 'til we are whole**

The world is white and black and full of pain, and Kathryn Janeway wants to die.

There are voices—soft voices, hushed voices, gentle voices—that speak to her. They say words she does not understand, and words she does not want to understand, and the words are sweet, like honey and wine and poison. She chokes on them as they slide over her skin, slick and cloying and intoxicating.

She hates them—hates the way they feel as they drip against her body, against her mind and memories—and hates the promises they try to make. She hates them, until she wants to tear them and the voices that speak them to tattered ribbons.

But to do that, she would need to open her eyes. And she does not want to open her eyes.

All she wants, really, is to die—to die, and to make the voices silent, and she thinks those two desires may not be mutually exclusive.

She shouldn't want to die, she thinks—distantly, vaguely, the thought like a phantom drifting through the mist of pain which holds her body and mind in a lover's embrace. She's not supposed to want to die; she's supposed to fight, to be strong, and to always push through the pain and the exhaustion.

She is Kathryn Janeway, she thinks—though what that means loses the importance she knows it should hold. But she is Kathryn Janeway, and so she knows in her bones that she should want to persevere. To fight. To be strong. To overcome the pain and the exhaustion that burn beneath her skin, that wail through her bones. To fill the hollowness that eats at her ribs with each crash of memory and wave of pain.

It is enough to choke her—and choke she does, once, twice, a hundred times, on salt and bile and her own saliva—and it is enough to crush her, until she whimpers and cries and screams from it. And whimper and cry and scream from it she does, and her screams taste of blood.

The voices that drip around her speak their honeyed words with desperation, until they are joined by a multitude of grasping, pressing hands that push her flat. The blood rises in her throat, mixed with salt and saliva and bile, and it crashes against the sweet poison of the words that pour over and around her.

She does not want to persevere. She does not want to fight, or be strong, or to push through the emptiness and the pain and the exhaustion.

The hands that hold her are hard, and soft, and steel. And the world bleeds to red, and her screams bleed into her mouth and over her lips and against the words and against the hands, and she thrashes under a hundred memories that surge like the tide beneath her skin.

She wants to die.

"Easy, Kathryn," the voices implore, soft, hushed, gentle. And they beg, in honeyed words she cannot—will not—understand, and promise, "You're going to be okay."

But there is only pain, and poison, and a thousand memories of stone and flesh. The voices and the hands do not understand—will not understand—that all she is and all she can remember to be is blood and screaming and a growing emptiness between her ribs.

She is nothing, and that knowledge takes root and blossoms in her hollow chest—nothing but pain and the sound of screams and the memory of flesh against flesh.

She is nothing save for, lurking beneath it all, the yawning wish for death.

~*x*~

When Kathryn wakes, it is to the sound of hushed voices and the hum of engines. There is a bed beneath her, and a blanket covering her, and her hands feel stiff and swollen. When she looks at them, she finds that her skin is purple and black, and that her fingers are splinted straight with thick, clear medical plastic.

Then there are footsteps, and the scent of sweet vanilla and jasmine, and Kathryn looks up to see a woman approaching her bed. She is tall and narrow-shouldered, with red hair that curls around the blue of her Starfleet uniform, and eyes that glint grey in the room's white light.

"Where am I?" Kathryn asks. Her voice is hoarse and shallow, and the words feel distant and brittle as they drop from her tongue.

"You're on the _Dawnbreaker_ ," the woman says. She smiles kindly at Kathryn, and the medical tricorder that Kathryn did not see her take out beeps. "You and Captain Paris were rescued two days ago."

Kathryn blinks. "Two days?" She feels empty, drifting, and it is difficult to focus on the woman's face as she steps closer still, a hypospray appearing in her hand as unexpectedly as the tricorder had. "But…"

"Sleep, Ensign," the woman says softly—soft, hushed, gentle—and the hypospray rises and presses against Kathryn's neck. "You'll be home soon."

~*x*~

Her dreams are black, and her thoughts are grey, and her body is purple and blue.

She is rarely awake—truly, fully awake and aware of her surroundings. She knows this because, when she is awake, her body is numb and the walls are white and the lights are gentle, and she is alone; but she is rarely numb, and the walls are almost never white, and most of the time, when she opens her eyes, she is shrouded in darkness. And she is never alone.

They watch her from the shadows that press against her eyes, and their hands reach from the dark corners of her mind. She feels stone beneath her abraded back as often as a bed, and heavy bodies pressing down on her more often than she feels the soft touch of cotton blankets. The eyes are flat, and yellow and black and ringed by ridged and scaled grey skin. The hands are hard and demanding, and they bruise and pinch her thighs and stomach and breasts, and they force her legs open and tear the thin cloth of the hospital gown from her body, leaving her naked to the darkness.

And she screams, and begs them to stop, and the world flashes white with gentle light, and her body flares with numbness—and then there is shadow again, and the eyes blink from the dark corners of the room, and the hands reach for her from the walls, and they grab her and hold her down and open her body for their touch. And she cries against the memory of their skin, and against the taste of the salt of their saliva and the salt of their seed, and she is anything but numb.

~*x*~

"We can't keep her sedated much longer. The strain on her body—"

"—And what of the strain on her mind?"

"We don't know how she'll react to waking fully, sir. For all we know, she could react well."

"For _all we know_. That's nothing more than a guess, Doctor. And everything thus far indicates that her psyche is not yet ready to deal with conscious reality."

"The _Dawnbreaker's_ doctor reported that she was calm and cognizant when she woke after her second surgery."

"The _Dawnbreaker's_ doctor also reported that she began hallucinating again shortly thereafter—and she hasn't stopped since."

"Sir, I'm just not sure what choice we have. Unless we place her in a fully induced coma, her body simply can't handle the strain of the sedatives for much longer."

"…She's my _daughter_ , Doctor."

"I know, sir. Which is why I need you to make the call."

"I— Fuck. Fuck it all to hell."

"Admiral?"

"Take her off. But at the first sign that she's in danger…"

"We'll be monitoring her the entire time. She's going to be okay, sir. You have to believe that—for her, and for yourself."

"How can you say that? You know what they did to her, Doctor."

"…No, I don't. And with all due respect, sir, neither do you."

"But—"

"We know what Captain Paris said happened. And we know what the medical reports say. But we don't know what happened, sir. Not really. Only she does—and only she can deal with it. You can't deal with it for her, sir."

"Doctor…"

"I'm sorry, sir. That was out of line. Excuse me."

~*x*~

The first thing she sees when she wakes—really, truly wakes—is sunlight. It slants in through the window to the right of her bed and falls across the blankets that lay on top of her. She is warm, and the room sparkles with the sheen of things far too clean.

The second thing she sees is her father's face.

He is sitting to the left of her bed, in a chair that seems at least two sizes too small for his broad shoulders. When he sees her eyes on him, he smiles, and there is something in his eyes that, inexplicably, makes Kathryn want to cry.

"You're awake," he says, and it sounds like a benediction.

The door opens behind him, then, and anything else he might have said is lost to the bustle of a dark-skinned Vulcan nurse coming in to take Kathryn's vitals, and to ask her what Kathryn believes is an inane number of redundant questions about how she feels.

Her father leaves only when the sunlight begins to fade, and the day slants towards dusk. He sits down on the side of her bed, and holds her hand, and he tells her how happy he is to see her awake.

Kathryn smiles at him, and squeezes his hand, and wonders why he was so worried.

That night, she has her first nightmare.

~*x*~

The first thing Kathryn learns about Justin Tighe, other than that he is a lieutenant and that he has an attitude that can grate on every one of her nerves, is that he has a crooked smile. The second thing is that his hands are as scarred as his eyes, and that both are rarely still.

She had met him once before, when they were stationed, briefly, together. She had hated him then. He was cocky, and sharp-tongued, and she loathed the smooth arrogance with which he walked and talked. He had had no qualms about speaking his mind—and his mind, Kathryn had quickly determined, was not a thing that she liked.

Now, though—here, sitting in the hospital with his scarred eyes on her and his lips flat and sharp tongue still—she begins to see a different side of him; now, she begins to see the man that she had met days earlier, when he had pulled the mask off of his face as he knelt beside where she was bleeding out on the floor, when he had said, "It's okay, Ensign. We're here to rescue you."

"Hey," he says, smiling when she wakes late in the afternoon to see him sitting by her bed. She stiffens in sharp pain with the suddenness of his voice and the blunt slap of his presence, and he lifts his hands in a swiftly placating gesture. He holds a small ball with the fingers of his right hand, the red surface scuffed and stained with long use. "Sorry," he says quickly, bright eyes flashing with a thought she cannot name, "I didn't mean to scare you."

For a second Kathryn wants to be angry with him—for scaring her, for thinking he had scared her, for not wanting to scare her—but then she decides that at least he's being honest with her, which is better than most.

She looks up at him, wary and bristling, from the corner of her eyes. "What do you want?" she asks.

He hesitates, and Kathryn is gratified in a dark and cruel part of her heart to see him suddenly uncertain. His eyes flicker again with an unreadable thought. "Do you remember me?" he asks at last. The ball twists and twirls in the palm of his right hand, spun again and again and a hundred times again between his thumb and ring finger. "The doctor said that you might—"

She remembers pain, and blood, and the smell of vomit and urine and stale Cardassian semen, and then the sound of the cell door opening and a voice—his voice—at her shoulder. She remembers his face bathed in the harsh lights of the Cardassian hall as he and another man in Starfleet yellow half-dragged, half-carried her out of the prison. She remembers his shout, remembers the darkness of the night, remembers both of them falling as the other man half-carrying her was shot dead through the right side of his chest.

She remembers crawling back to him, towards his face now bathed in shadow and agony, and grabbing his jacket. She remembers speaking, but she cannot remember what she said, and she remembers dragging him up with her, pulling his arm over her shoulders in a sickly mockery of his aid mere moments before.

She remembers seeing his face, smeared with dust and smoke and adrenaline, kneeling over her in the last seconds before she lost consciousness.

Kathryn looks at him from the corners of her eyes, and she says, "I remember you."

The man who she will learn is named Justin nods once. "Good," he says, and clears his throat.

"Why are you here?" Kathryn asks again. She wants him—and the memories he carries with him—gone.

"I just—" and he hesitates again, the ball spinning, spinning, spinning in his hand. She will learn that he is rarely uncertain, except with her. "I wanted to see how you were doing."

Kathryn thinks of her nightmares. She thinks of her father standing and watching her from the door of her room when he thinks she is sleeping. She thinks of the pain she still thinks she feels, and the phantom hands that roam her body every night.

She does not think about the fact that, when she wakes from her nightmares, she looks for him—for his blue eyes and close-cut hair and sandstone jaw—and listens for his voice through the shudder of her heart. She does not want to admit, to herself or to anyone, that she has, and probably forever will, think of him as her savior.

"I'm fine," she says.

He looks at her, unblinking, and the ball spins to a slow halt in his palm. She knows he knows that she is lying.

"I see," is all he says. He opens his mouth, as if to speak again, then snaps it shut. The ball bounces to his left hand. "Well," he says, and he stands. The ball flicks back to his right hand. "I'll see you around, Ensign."

He leaves, and Kathryn watches his back, and pretends not to feel as if she has lost something.

~*x*~

The psychologist that they assign to Kathryn is a bright young Betazoid woman with a soothing smile and a calming voice. Her name is Karanna.

Kathryn hates her almost on sight.

She is surly throughout the entirety of their first meeting. It ends with her snapping, "Stop asking me these fucking questions. You're a Betazoid, so why don't you just feel them and get on with it?" When Kathryn sneaks a look at her file later that night, on the padd she had convinced her father to bring to her, she sees that she has been labeled _Resistant to Treatment._ And, beneath that, _Status: Unfit for redeployment._

After that, Kathryn makes an effort to be more cooperative.

It only takes three days for Kathryn to learn that one can lie to a Betazoid. The night before, she had woken from her nightmares seven times. She tells Karanna that she had woken only four. Karanna smiles, and says that she is pleased with Kathryn's progress, and that she hopes to see continued improvement in tandem with Kathryn's return from the brink of exhaustion.

Kathryn smiles, and agrees.

From that moment, though Karanna does not know it, she has lost Kathryn.

~*x*~

Kathryn is released from the hospital after two weeks. The doctors say that they are hopeful that she will make a full recovery. They mean, though they do not say, that they hope that the scar tissue that remains from the field surgery will not impede Kathryn's future attempts at having children.

Kathryn smiles, and thanks the doctors, and then she goes home and locks the door to her bedroom, curls up in sheets that smell of dust and disuse, and she does not cry, even when the daylight dims and the demons crawl out from the corners of her mind.

~*x*~

Kathryn sits on her couch, a glass of wine in one hand and a tattered copy of _The Iliad_ propped up on one knee, when she feels it coalesce, real and hard and heavy, for the first time. The aching emptiness between her ribs, which she has grown to know like a lover since the first day she woke on the _Dawnbreaker_ , yawns, black and wide and sour, and reaches up into her throat with tongues of boiling anger that seek to burn her to ash. Her eyes slow to a crawl across the page, then to a halt, as she feels it claw at her insides.

 _They fucked you_ , the emptiness whispers in her ears, in her chest, in her stomach, lower still. _They fucked you, and fucked you, and fucked you._

 _And you liked it,_ the emptiness does not say.

She shakes her head, tells herself that she hated every moment of it, that she would give anything to have those moments made undone. She tells herself that she came because she had to; because the mind protects itself, and the body betrays itself, and she had no choice.

The voice changes tactics.

 _You begged them to fuck your captain,_ it whispers, whispers, whispers. _You betrayed him._

"They made me do it," Kathryn whispers in return. Her voice is small and weak in the empty air of her apartment.

 _No,_ the emptiness whispers. _No, you had a choice. And you chose._

Kathryn Janeway does not like getting drunk. It makes her slow and stupid and mean, and in her estimation, it is far more hassle than it is worth. She has a proclivity for vomiting from hangovers, and it takes at least a full day for her to bridle the anger and sharp tongue that too much alcohol loosens. She doesn't like opening the iron chains of control she has spent years constructing around her thoughts and emotions. And when she's drunk, she unlocks the chains with a crowbar.

That night she makes an exception.

She drowns the raging hollow in her chest with the rest of the bottle of wine, and half of a second. She vomits, and passes out on the floor in her small kitchen, the tile cold against her cheek. When she wakes, she vomits again. But the anger—fresh and new and all-consuming—that had blossomed from the black hollow between her ribs and grown into her mouth is lulled back into its aching emptiness.

Her peace does not last long.

When Karanna asks her that afternoon how she is feeling, Kathryn smiles through her headache, and tells her that she is fine—that she drank a glass of wine and read a hundred pages of _The Iliad_ the night before, then went to bed early and woke only twice. The therapist smiles, and nods, and says that she is making good progress.

Kathryn smiles relief, and the therapist believes it is relief at her progress.

That night, as Kathryn stands at the replicator in her small kitchen, mere feet from where she woke that morning, she feels it again. It is blacker than hate, and surges like a wave of bile, and it reaches through her ribs and into her mouth with bitter wrath. It is tangible, and realer than the tiles beneath her feet or the lingering scent of vomit, and she thinks that if she could only carve open skin and sinew and bone, she would find it swollen and pulsing between her lungs.

She cannot name it. She cannot quantify it. It simply is—and it devours her.

There is not enough alcohol left in her apartment to make a repeat of the night before. So Kathryn slips on a dress her sister had given her at Christmas the year before, steps into a pair of uncomfortable heels, and goes to find absolution.

The bar she chooses is crowded and dimly lit. Music pulses through the air and the cracked tile floor, matching the flickering lights mounted above the cordoned dance area. Kathryn slides through the throng towards the bar that lines the right wall, and when she gets there, she props her hip against the counter and simply asks for something strong. The bartender flashes her a winking grin, and a moment later, Kathryn has a glass of pale alcohol in her hands that burns as she swallows.

The burn, she realizes as she downs the last of it, touches the thing growing from the emptiness between her ribs—touches it, and seeps down into it, and makes it pulse a little less.

She feels more human than she has since she woke on the _Dawnbreaker._

A man three stools to her right leans over the bar counter, snagging Kathryn's attention. She half-turns so that she can watch him warily out of her peripheral vision, but does not want to engage him. He, however, has other ideas.

"Rough day?" he asks, after standing and moving toward her. He drops onto the stool beside which she stands, and motions for the bartender to get Kathryn another drink. "On me," he tells her, meeting her eyes with a steady, charming smile.

"Thank you," Kathryn says, not entirely honestly, but she lifts the second tumbler of pale alcohol the bartender sets in front of her and drinks anyway.

"So," the man says, tilting forward on his stool, bracing an elbow against the stained countertop, "bad day?"

Kathryn snorts, and the alcohol snakes up into her nose. Her eyes water, and she swallows quickly to avoid coughing. It hurts and she finds she cannot care. "Something like that," she tells the man, and takes another steady drink. "Now, if you'll excuse me," she says, and sets the empty tumbler on the counter and makes to turn away.

He reaches out and grabs her by the wrist, dragging her to a halt. "Hey, wait a minute," he says, voice rising in protest. "I bought you a drink. The least you can do is dance with me."

Kathryn whirls with a snarl and rips her wrist free from his hold. She stumbles, drunker than she realized, but steadies herself with the counter and takes a menacing step toward the man still seated on his stool. His face is suddenly slack, and he is pale beneath the freckles sprayed across his nose and cheeks.

"You filthy little fuck," Kathryn hisses, and lifts a balled hand as if to punch him. "How fucking dare you lay a hand on me."

She feels hands—hard hands, grey hands—around her wrists, around her ankles and knees and throat. She feels their rough skin, and the weight of their bodies, and the warmth of their breath as their mouths latch onto her bare skin.

"I'm sorry," the man babbles, shrinking away. He seems suddenly small. "I just wanted to ask you to dance."

"Then you should have asked me to dance," Kathryn tells him, high and cold. Her hand falls to her side.

Grey fingers brush over her side, ghosts beneath her own hands. They creep along the insides of her thighs, pinch her breasts.

She feels again the solid, warm weight of the man's hand closing around her wrist.

The emptiness and the black anger growing from it, momentarily sated by the liquid burn of the alcohol and of her drunkenness, gurgles, hot and black and sticky, and rises anew into her throat. It clutches at her, growls with desire, and spreads its tendrils to her fingers, her knees, her tongue.

Kathryn turns and pushes her way into the crowd. This time the man does not try to stop her.

She knows that she should leave. She is drunk, and the ghosts of the unnumbered hands crawl over her skin beneath her dress. Her body throbs, and the emptiness in her groans, and her head pulses, and anger of two shades turns the inside of her skin to blood.

She knows that she should leave—but she is drunk, and she is angry, and both things make her careless and carefree.

So Kathryn pushes her way into the crowd, and there she loses herself. The music pounds, and the lights are dim and flickering, and the men and women of all skins and sizes are smears of shadow above and around her. The hands crawl over her, drowning beneath the shadows and the music and the lights—and then hands join the hands, warm and hard and real, on her shoulders and back and down to her ass.

When she does not pull away, held still by the memory of hands that would not let her go, the man who joined her leans down and says into her ear, "You look lonely. Care for some company?"

He is human, pale-skinned and dark-haired, with eyes made of night. His breath is hot and moist with alcohol against the flesh of her cheek, and his hands are warm, and hard, and real. Where they touch the cloth over her skin, the ghosts' hands are flattened to paper.

A warning whimpers in Kathryn's chest. The black anger leeching into Kathryn's mouth turns warm. There is fear, but there is also hunger—hunger to feel again the empty anger settling back into its hollow between her ribs. Hunger to feel the pain that, for a moment, had made her feel real again.

She ignores the warning, tastes the warmth, and presses her body closer to the man with real hands. She tells him yes.

They dance, inches of drunken heat between their bodies, their hands meeting flesh and cloth and flesh again. Kathryn groans into the music, into the space between her body and the man's, a murmur of memory and pain and hope, and rolls her face toward the strobing ceiling. The paper hands slide beneath her dress to gather between her legs, and she feels the edges of their fingertips nick her skin; she feels sick, beneath the music and the heat and the drunkenness, bile crawling at her throat—and it is delicious, and vindictive, and it joins with the warmth of the black anger in her mouth to make a sticky, bitter tar.

When the man leans down after three songs and kisses her, Kathryn surprises herself by not resisting. The tar coats her teeth, and coats her lips, and she smiles into the man's mouth as it coats his tongue as well. His chest is hot against hers, his hands cinders as they pull her hips against his. The paper hands between her legs flutter, demanding to be remembered—and they are—and she kisses him back, mouth open against his, demanding to be heard.

The warning groans— _no, stop, this will end with pain_ —and the tar slides up her nose and down her throat. Teeth tear at her skin, fingers at her clothes. She is naked and drowning in faces and eyes and tongues; and the man's real, real hands are an anchor around her waist, holding her feet firm to the ground.

"Kiss me," Kathryn demands when they stagger out from the crush of bodies thronging the dance floor. She pushes the man against the pitted and stained wall a dozen drunken steps back, and he grunts with a smile. Their teeth clack, and their breath is sour as it mingles, but Kathryn does not mind as she drinks, drinks, drinks of the tar running over her lips and down her chin.

His hands wander over the slick, sweat-damped cloth of her dress, then creep beneath. Her skirt is bunched between them, tight against the backs of her thighs, and his fingers ghost over the pale skin of her stomach—a facsimile of the paper hands that pinch and roll within her, turning her hot and hard and desperate.

"My place or yours?" the man asks.

"Yours," Kathryn gasps.

They find a transport station half a stumbling block deeper into the city, and from there the man's flat is a laugh and three sloppy kisses away. It takes the man two tries to unlock the door, and then they are inside, clothes pulled over their heads and dropped carelessly to the floor even before both have fully crossed over the threshold.

Kathryn cries out when she orgasms against the stranger's bedroom door, and it sounds like a scream. It is vindication, and agony, and as hoarse and tacky as half-dried blood. The man groans into her, his own release spilling down the insides of her thighs—and through the ebbing wave of her own pleasure, Kathryn feels the warmth coat her legs twice, five times, a hundred times from a hundred different memories.

She hurts, and she hates, and she exults in both. The pain echoes in her head, in her heart, in the scars between her legs, and the ugly sound of its thrashing puts all the rest to shame. The tar turns brittle and then crumbles to dust; the anger settles back into the hollow between her ribs with a whimper and a mewl, and suddenly she is nothing but Kathryn again—empty and broken too human to bear.

Her hands shake as she picks her clothes up from the floor, and the rest of her shakes as she hides her skin beneath the cloth of her dress and the frail straps of her shoes. She smiles at the man, and she says thank you, and she walks out of his front door without looking back.

It is only when she is unlocking her own apartment door that Kathryn realizes she never knew the other man's name.

She thinks, as she climbs into the shower, it was better that way.

And as she washes away the evidence of her memories, the penance of her pain, she thinks that this will be the end.

~*x*~

It is not the end.

~*x*~

Even after three glasses of whiskey from a badly stained bar, tucked away at the back of a pub in the back alley of a back street, Kathryn still trounces all four men who challenge her in pool. The last man—tall, and broad-shouldered, with a tan that speaks of long days out in the sun—looms over her and claims that she cheated.

Kathryn, drunk and angry and careless, punches him.

He punches her back.

They fuck in the stall in the men's bathroom, Kathryn's back against the wall, her legs wrapped around his hips. Her nails score deep tracks down his shoulders, and his teeth leave drops of blood on her neck. She throws her head back and groans against each thrust of his body into hers, against each memory that creeps behind her eyes and fills her body with one, two, three dozen Cardassian cocks that felt just like his does.

And the anger and the hatred in her chest swell, and surge, and then abate, sated by pain and the desperation of her orgasm, leaving only the familiar, aching emptiness in their wake.

~*x*~

The second week after Kathryn's release from the hospital, her father comes to see her in her apartment.

"How are you doing, Katie?" he asks her, settling down onto her couch with a sigh.

"Fine," Kathryn says with a smile. Her hands flutter, and when she sits beside him she does not lean far enough back that the bruises and bite marks on her shoulders will pull against her shirt.

"Your mother is worried," her father says. His tone is matter-of-fact, and his face is open, but beneath it Kathryn can hear that he, too, is worried.

"I don't mean to worry her," Kathryn says. "I just have a lot going on."

Her father nods. "Would you come to dinner tonight?" he asks. One thing that Kathryn has always loved about him is that he has never been coy with his intentions—not, at least, when it came to her.

"If you insist," Kathryn says. There was a new bar that she had intended to investigate that night, but her mother and father are worried. She does not want them to worry. She does not want them to hover.

She does not want them to know what she is doing to herself, in her unending search for— For what? she asks herself. Penance? Pain? Absolution?

Kathryn pushes such thoughts aside. She does not need to know the why. Not yet. Not now.

"I do," her father says. And then, "We'll see you at six."

And then, because he is uncertain, and he is worried, he stands and leaves with only a kiss to her cheek.

Kathryn climbs the steps up to the front porch of her childhood home at two minutes past six. She opens the door to the rich smell of Italian sausages sizzling in basil and oregano and oil. She barely makes it to the bathroom underneath the stairs before she drags the last traces of bile from her stomach with three heaves.

"Katie, honey?" her mother calls through the bathroom door. "Is that you?" Then, when Kathryn only coughs, she asks, "Is everything okay?"

"Fine," Kathryn says. Her voice sounds split and burned, as if the bile had touched it. "I'm fine. I'll be out to help you finish dinner in a minute."

She listens to her mother leave, bare feet padding down a hall of wooden boards that creak a symphony of which Kathryn knows every note. She hears a pan clatter in the kitchen, and then hears her little sister's voice rise in a sudden laugh. The sound is as wild as it is abrupt, as is Phoebe's way in everything.

Kathryn cannot stand the sound of it.

She stumbles up the stairs, blind and burning, and bolts herself into the bathroom she had once shared with her sister. The sink is cold against her hands when Kathryn leans over it, and her pale, washed-out reflection stares back with gaunt eyes as she looks into the mirror hanging in front of her.

Behind her, the shower beckons, white and pure and ready to wash from her the memories that have built an unseen prism around her heart—a prism that has brought any food she swallows up again in bitter moments; a prism that has made the sound of her sister's laugh an awful thing, an alien thing, from which she can only run.

The memories—oh, God, the memories—are too many, too strong. She was a child here, young and innocent; and now she is a twisted, corrupted, broken thing standing in the same place as she had at two, at seven, at seventeen when she had dreamed of walking the stars.

She has lost so much. She has lost everything. And what has she gained?

Bite marks and blotched skin appear in slow parade as Kathryn shrugs out of the too-large, knit sweater she put on against the Midwest autumn night. She did not wear a bra, and the reflection of her breasts is red with the echo of teeth from a man whose face she cannot recall.

He would not have fucked her, she thinks, if he had known who had come before him. None of them would have.

She sheds her pants, then her underwear. They drop to the floor around her ankles, and she runs numb fingers over the welts and the bruises and the red lines of scars that have yet to be forgotten—scars that creep out from between her legs, the remnants of the memory of a knife which is still too real for her to really remember.

She stands, naked and cold, in front of the mirror that watched her grow from child to young woman. Her skin is pure and smooth; her eyes are dark and broken.

Everything has changed, she thinks.

And then, with the same detached sense of finality, she thinks, I should want to die.

She is not, however, sure if she does. All she does know is that she wants to hurt. Because pain is the only thing that silences the raging emptiness between her ribs—the thing that turns the tar to dust, that forces the wild anger back to seeds in the emptiness between her ribs—and when she is in pain is the only time she is certain that she is real.

And so she turns to the shower, and with blind hands she turns the water on to hot. And as the mirror steams over, she climbs into the shower.

~*x*~

"What the fuck?" Then there are hands on her arms, and she is being dragged out from beneath the scalding water, sent tumbling to hard and cold tile. Kathryn's knees strike the floor, and her teeth rattle, and she shivers with surprise and cold and shock as water streams from her naked skin to form a seeping lake across the bathroom floor.

She throws up. The bile is bitter and sour and burns, just as it always does, and it splashes into the water on the tiles. Her skin aches, and the bruises and welts and lacerations crossing her shoulders and back and stomach and breasts and thighs burn.

And then rough cloth touches her back and shoulders, and Kathryn feels as much as hears someone—someone soft, someone gentle, someone feminine who she knows and loves and does not need to shrink away from—kneel beside her. A hand comes up to pull her dripping hair out of her face, and an arm settles around her shoulders, drawing her down against a narrow shoulder and a small breast.

"Kathryn," the voice says again—and the voice is soft and gentle and feminine, a voice she knows and loves and wants to shrink away from—, "what the fuck?"

Kathryn curls into her sister's chest, and cannot stop the tears that taste like bile and black tar from bubbling up her throat. They scald her tongue and burn her teeth, and as they drip down her cheeks, joining the rivulets of quickly-cooling water from the shower, it feels as if they are carving open her flesh. She cries, and leans boneless against her sister, and drowns in the water beneath her and the bile within.

Phoebe does not speak again until her tears dry. "Hold on," Phoebe says at last, at last, at last, breaking the echo of her curses, once Kathryn's tears have waned and dried, sticky and shameful. "I think Dad keeps a regenerator in his study. Don't worry," she adds, when she feels Kathryn stiffen, "If they ask, I'll just tell them you slipped in the shower."

And then she is gone, and the room is still and cold, and Kathryn shivers, and her hair clings like fingers to her neck and shoulders, and she feels empty—hollow, chiseled out like a stone tomb of an ancient Mesopotamian culture—and broken, and the black tar and black self-loathing and hatred sit in crystals along her ribs, lifeless and unmoving yet still sharp enough to cut her with each breath.

She does not know how long she kneels there, head bowed and shoulders hunched beneath the wet towel, when there comes a knock on the bathroom door, and she hears her mother's worried voice.

"Katie?" she hears her mother say, "are you okay? Phoebe said you fell."

She opens her mouth to speak, and finds she cannot. Only the bitter taste of vomit and a new flavor of shame and disgust comes to her tongue.

"Katie?" her mother says again.

She grits her teeth, and hunches her shoulders tighter, and pulls the towel more firmly around her naked body. Words of reassurance—lies, lies, and more lies—will not come, but she will be damned if her mother, already fretful and hovering, sees her ravaged body.

More footsteps. Phoebe's voice, hushed and reassuring. Footsteps again, retreating.

The door opens.

"I'm back," Phoebe says, needlessly.

When she kneels again, Kathryn does not resist when Phoebe tugs the towel away from her damp skin. It falls, limp and twisted and useless, on the wet floor. It looks, for a second, like a torn and discarded shirt.

She does not move while Phoebe turns on the regenerator, and begins to run it over the numerous minor wounds littering her skin. She does not fight her when she guides her to her feet, or even when she kneels in front of her to clean away the blackened bruises on her hips and thighs.

She does move, even when Phoebe stands again and looks her in the eye, sad and worried and afraid. She does not answer the unspoken question she reads there, and she turns away to dress without making a sound.

She suspects Phoebe knows the answer to her question, regardless.

~*x*~

Kathryn Janeway meets Justin Tighe for the third time two days before leaving Earth on her first assignment since the "shuttle accident" that grounded her for eight weeks. She is in a smoke-addled club with low seats and winding metal staircases that lead up to balconies filled with half-naked girls and half-clothed boys. He is standing at the bar when she arrives, and when her eyes meet with his, she sees that he is just as surprised to see her as she is him.

"Hi there," he says, stepping to the side to give Kathryn enough room to reach the bar. He holds a glass of what looks like vodka, and the scuffed red ball in the other hand, and he flags the bartender for another when Kathryn sends him a questioning glance. "I wouldn't have expected to see you at a place like this," he says—and Kathryn can feel him watching her for a reaction.

She just snorts. "I could say the same for you," she retorts. The bartender slides the shot of vodka in front of her, and Justin gives him a nod.

"If I was a little more poetic," Justin says, after Kathryn has slammed back the shot of vodka, "I might say this was fate."

Kathryn looks up at him. He meets her eyes, and he does not flinch. The ball spins in the palm of his hand.

"I don't put much stock in fate anymore," Kathryn says.

And still, Justin doesn't flinch. "No," is all he says, "I suppose not."

They kiss at the back of the club, hidden beneath the winding staircase that faces west. It is sloppy, and they are drunk, but Kathryn finds herself laughing when he pokes her as they pull apart.

It is the first time she has laughed in a very long time.

"Do you want to leave?" she asks him, when her laughter has faded.

And Justin looks at her, and he does not flinch, even when he says, "Yes, but I won't."

Kathryn frowns at him. Pulls away. "Why?" she snarls. She is drunk, and when she is drunk she is angry and careless. "Because I'm a Cardassian fuck toy? Does that make me somehow unworthy of your cock?"

And Justin looks at her, and does not flinch. "No," he says. "Because I want to know you want me, not just my cock."

Kathryn spits at him, and curses at him, and by the bruises on her knuckles the next morning, she thinks she punches him.

But two months later, when they meet again on Deep Space Seven, and they are only half drunk in the station's single bar, she looks at him, and she does not flinch when she says, "I want this."

And Justin nods, and the ball disappears into the pocket of his jacket, and when he leans forward to kiss her lips, which have not been coated with the black tar since two days before she left Earth, Kathryn thinks that maybe, maybe, she isn't as broken as she thought.


End file.
